The Ukrainian Museum is pleased to present The Tales and Myths of Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, who combines primitive art and biblical theology, the laconic style of posters, and brings his insight into human nature to canvas.

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern’s art plays a distinct role in his biography.
Although Petrovsky-Shtern’s main fields of interest are history and
literature, ranging from the Jewish Middle Ages to Hasidic folklore,
from the prose of Gabriel García Márquez to the Ukrainian renaissance
of the 1920s, it is on canvas that the depth of his knowledge of various
religions and cultures is transformed into a mysterious world of tales
and myths.

The fairy-tale quality of the artist’s work is fully manifested in paintings
such as A Carpathian Dream, Cossack Buy a Horse!, and Wolf in a
Village. Petrovsky-Shtern complements his use of restrained colors with
decorative elements of Ukrainian folk art , which attain living impulse
through their imaginative whimsy and richness of form. For the painter,
the transformation of a horse into a giraffe or a deer and the narrative
of the wolf are simply springboards for his unique take on well-known
fairy tales. The main characters in his paintingsthe wolf and the
Ukrainian villagersare portrayed at the moment of panicky fear of
human beings left face-to-face with what they consider a wild beast. In
the background are a hill, a well, a hut, and an innall archaic and,
one might even say, stereotypical elements of a village landscape. The
villagers’ flight reveals the key element of the paintinga fantastic wolf
whose extraordinarily kind and deep eyes reflect flowers as though they
were mirrors. Of immense interest is the depiction of the wolf itself. The
flowery ornament of his blossoming nose clearly has its origins in the
plethora of decorative paintings that adorned Ukrainian village houses,
stoves, walls, and dishes.

Petrovsky-Shtern’s Ukrainian motifs are far from accidental. More
emotionally loaded and thematically trenchant than his Ukrainian
fairy-tale series is his painting Holodomor (Stalin’s terror-famine of
1932&150;1933). The central composition in Holodomor, which imitates
the style of propaganda posters, depicts Ukrainian peasants during a
harvest. Running along the upper and lower edges of the painting are
Red Army prodzahony (ration patrols), symmetrically placed to frame
an imaginary circle from which there is no escape. Petrovsky-Shtern’s
color choices of red, black, and white reconstruct the predicament of the
Ukrainian peasants and the contrast of emotional tensions: the harvest
against a black swath of sky; the woman who embodies Ukraine with a
few stalks of wheat; the children sitting down to eat their lunch. Lurking
behind these sceneslike a photographic negative for the vieweris
the symbolism of death and its fearful machinery.

The work Pogrom in a Shtetl can be added to the revealing readings of
modern history through Jewish eyes. For Jewish artistswriters, painters,
composers, directorsthe themes of pogroms and the Holocaust are
intertwined in a knot of eternal contradictions between humanist ideas
and displays of xenophobia, all of which led to the particularly cruel mass
murder of Jews in the twentieth century. This is why Petrovsky-Shtern
paints in Pogrom in a Shtetl, against the background of tiny houses in
a Jewish town, an enormous crocodile who uses its long, red body to
reduce everything in its path to dust. In this way, Petrovsky-Shtern’s
Jewish themes symbolize the universal and personified story of loss and
tragedy.

At this stage, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern’s tales and myths form the
foundation of his artistic philosophy, while the forms of intellectual
narrative originating from the study of religion and culture permeate
his entire artistic universe.

Vasyl MakhnoPoet, writer

About the Museum

The Ukrainian Museum acquires, preserves, and exhibits articles of artistic or historic significance to the rich cultural heritage of Ukrainian Americans. Its collections include thousands of items of folk art, fine art, and archival material. At its founding in 1976 by the Ukrainian National Women's League of America, the Museum was hailed as one of the finest achievements of Americans of Ukrainian descent. Since then, and particularly since its move in 2005 to a new, state-of-the-art building in Manhattan's vibrant East Village, it has become known as one of the most interesting and dynamic smaller museums in New York City. Each year, the Museum organizes several exhibitions, publishes bilingual (English/Ukrainian) catalogues, and presents a wide range of public and educational programs, including concerts, films, lectures, courses, workshops, and special events.